A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

by Tyler Dilts

  I had a big cup of coffee and scrolled through the LA Times and the Press-Telegram online and then decided to head in to work early.

  Before I left, though, an idea occurred to me. Why take a chance on a landlord’s reasonableness? I got a crescent wrench and went into the bathroom. With a washcloth wrapped around the flats where the showerhead attached to the pipe, I used the wrench to loosen and remove the showerhead. I dropped it into my courier bag and took it with me.

  Fight the power.

  The squadroom was empty, as it usually was early on mornings after no one got murdered. I had the place to myself for more than an hour. The quiet helped me get the piles of paperwork on my desk sorted out. Just as I was about to turn my attention back toward Bishop’s case, Patrick rushed into the room. “We got prints on some of the brass we found at the Ohio shooting,” he said. He looked expectantly at Ruiz’s office.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Tell me more.”

  “Two sets. One of them we’ve got on file.”

  “Who?”

  “Guy with three arrests, but no convictions. Robert Medina.”

  “What were the arrests?”

  “One car theft, one battery, one ADW.”

  “Know who he runs with?”

  “No. File says ‘undetermined.’”

  “Talked to anyone in the gang detail?”

  “No one’s there yet.”

  “You know Hynes? He came in on Saturday to help ID our guy from Riverside. I’ll give him a call.”

  “You’re gonna owe me, Beckett,” Hynes said.

  Patrick and I met him in the Organized Crime Detail’s squad room. “It’s only forty-five minutes before the start of your shift.”

  “Early is early.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Lunch is on me. What do you want?”

  “A pizza from Michael’s.”

  Michael’s was an upscale pizza joint that Zagat had recently rated the best in Los Angeles. It was okay, but as far as I was concerned, any place that didn’t actually have pepperoni on the menu had no business claiming to make pizza. “You got it.”

  Patrick said, “You have anything on our guy?”

  “I don’t recognize the name offhand,” Hynes said. “But he shows up in the database.”

  “He have any affiliations?” I asked.

  “There are a few known connections with a couple of different sets, but they’re thin, nothing definitive.”

  Patrick was looking over his shoulder. “What’s the program you’re running?”

  Brad said, “It’s new. Based on stuff the military was using in Iraq and Afghanistan to track insurgents. Collects metadata, social media, cell phones, anything digital we can get. We’re trying to get it to mesh with our old-school intel.”

  Patrick leaned in closer to the screen. “Is that ORCA?”

  “No,” Hynes said. “But it’s the same basic concept.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “An acronym,” Patrick said to me. “Organizational, Relationship, and Contact Analyzer.”

  He turned back to Hynes. “Any chance I could get access to it?”

  “I’ll have to run it by the lieutenant. It’s a pilot program, so they’re being pretty tight with who they’ll let play with it.”

  “Should I get Ruiz to ask?”

  “Let me try first.” On the screen in front of him, Hynes was clicking on little diagrams that connected dots in increasingly complex patterns. Patrick’s eyes were glued to the images, but I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. I wanted to ask more about it, but I didn’t. He was absorbed in the data, so I just watched and let him go with it. My curiosity could wait.

  I left them to the program and headed back to my desk.

  When Patrick came back twenty minutes later, he was clearly excited.

  “Get anything?” I asked.

  “Not yet, but this could be huge for the case.”

  “How is that different from what you were doing with the Facebook and Twitter stuff?”

  “It’s the same basic idea, but I was doing everything manually,” Patrick said. “With the program’s processing power it’ll crunch all the data thousands of times faster than I could. And find more connections.”

  “So we can figure out who Medina and the other shooters from Ohio Avenue were working with.”

  “And a lot more.”

  “Think they’ll let you use it?” I asked.

  “No idea,” he said. “I hope so.”

  “What’s your next move?”

  “Find Medina.”

  17

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  My phone rang, and I was surprised to see Julia Rice’s name on the screen. I wondered why she was calling. The message I’d left for her said that, unfortunately, Bishop wasn’t in any of the photos she had prepared for us. I thanked her and thought that would be that. But maybe she had found something else. More photos to look at. While I was trying to decide if I should answer it, the call went to my voice mail. As soon as it was complete, I listened.

  “Hello, Detective Beckett. I got your message. I’m sorry the photos didn’t help. I . . . would you call me back if you have a chance? There’s something I’d like to ask you. It’s not related to the case. Thanks.”

  I listened to it again. The pause made it sound like she was uncertain about something. What could it have been? If she’d found more photos, she wouldn’t have said it was unrelated to the case.

  When Jen sat down at her desk, I played it for her. “What do you think that’s about?” I asked.

  She looked at me before answering. “What do you think it’s about?”

  “I don’t know.” Or maybe I just didn’t want to know. “That’s why I’m asking.”

  “Why didn’t you just call her back?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How many calls do you return in a day? Thirty? Forty?”

  “Depends on the day.” I didn’t see what she was getting at. “You do just as many as I do. What’s your point?”

  “How many of them do you listen to five times and analyze before getting back to the person?”

  The answer was, of course, none. “Every once in a while, when a suspect or a witness calls, you know. Trying to figure out the subtext.”

  “She’s a suspect now?” Jen raised her eyebrows.

  “No.”

  “Just a person of interest.”

  “Would you please just say what you mean?” I said, hoping that my suspicions about Julia’s reason for calling might be mistaken.

  She studied me, trying to see if I did in fact know what she was talking about or whether I really was dense enough to miss her implication. I wasn’t, not quite. But I wasn’t going to admit it, not to her and especially not to myself.

  “She wants to ask you out,” Jen said, trying hard to make it sound like a simple matter of fact.

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it would be inappropriate. She’s involved in the case.”

  “No, she’s not. She tried to help. She couldn’t. She’s done with it.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” I said. We didn’t. It was very unlikely that she’d have any further involvement with the case, but we couldn’t be positive.

  “If she hadn’t been involved at all, what would you do?”

  “But she was involved.” I thought about what Jen was saying. It had been twenty years since I’d been on a date. And I hadn’t even considered becoming involved with anyone since my wife’s death. There’d been a single one-night stand with a patrol sergeant from Garden Grove after a retirement party more than a year earlier, but my most vivid memory of that incident was the relief I felt when she didn’t return my call the next day.

  “Would you go out with her if she wasn’t?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that question. J
ulia Rice was attractive and smart. I liked her. But the thought of dating her or anyone made me feel uneasy. It was difficult to imagine myself in that situation. “Fuck if I know,” I said.

  “You should just call her back and talk to her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because everyone who cares about you is afraid you’re going to wind up old and alone and depressed, sitting in a dark room thinking about putting the barrel of your gun in your mouth.”

  When she saw the expression on my face she said, “Too on the nose?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “A little bit.”

  When Marty came in, Patrick filled him in on the developments in the case. “We know where to find Medina?” Marty asked.

  His first thought, like mine, was to get out on the street and track him down.

  But Patrick said, “I’m waiting on his phone records. I already started looking at his location tags on Facebook, so that should help us narrow his movements.”

  “How about knocking on his door?” Marty said.

  “Of course,” Patrick said. “But shouldn’t we try to figure out if he’s there first?”

  “Yes,” I said. “If he’s not, we could give him a heads-up.”

  “Okay,” Marty said. “Have a warrant yet?”

  Patrick nodded. “And a BOLO.”

  “You have anything so far?” Marty asked.

  “Last thing he posted on Facebook was after two this morning. A status update. ‘Long-ass day good night.’ Gives his location as ‘Near Compton.’ That fits the address we have for him. North of the 91 off of Atlantic. Waiting on cell-phone records. Should be here soon.”

  “He have a job?” Marty asked.

  “Not that we know of. Gang Enforcement thinks he’s banging full time.”

  Marty seemed skeptical. “So we’re just going to watch him online?”

  “For today. He usually posts a status update or tweets when he’s done for the day. I think we wait for his signoff and then bust his front door down.”

  I understood Marty’s doubts. He had spent a career hunting suspects on the street and was dubious of technology. Things had been advancing so fast in the last few years with cell phones and other connected technology that it often seemed like we had a new playbook every week. But I trusted Patrick. And I realized what I’m sure was one of his primary motivations for his plan: if we waited until that night to pick up Medina, Patrick would have another day’s worth of metadata to add to his investigation.

  Jen was meeting with an ADA about a trial in which she had to testify, so I went to the Potholder Too by myself for lunch. The lunch crowd was light, and there was a table open by the window that looked out over a small patio and onto Broadway. If I leaned a little bit to the left, I could see the LBPD headquarters across the street. So I made it a point to sit straight up.

  An older server who usually worked at the original location in Belmont Heights came over to the table. Her nametag read Fullerton. I’d always wondered about the story behind that, but never asked. She recognized me too, but we’d never established a relationship that went deeper than casual remarks about the weather. I kind of liked it that way, and I assumed that she did, too.

  “Coffee or Diet Coke?” she asked.

  “Let’s go with the soda.”

  “And a Rancher?”

  “Let’s go with the chicken-fried steak.” I wasn’t sure where the spontaneous order came from. It was as much of a surprise to me as it was to her.

  She looked out through the window and up at the sky, then back at me. “Just had to see if any pigs were flying out there.”

  I laughed and tried to remember when I’d had anything other than the Rancher. Years ago, when Megan and I would fight the weekend breakfast crowds at the original café, I dabbled occasionally in French toast and waffles, but before too long, I settled into a routine. That’s been my standard MO for as long as I can remember. Find a restaurant I like and a dish I like and just keep ordering it forever. Back then, once I’d figured things out, it was always chicken-fried steak.

  I hadn’t thought about that when Fullerton took my order. I’d been planning on the usual corned-beef-and-bacon omelet. Why had I changed my order?

  The obvious answer, I thought, shifting into my armchair psychologist self-diagnosis mode, was that my subconscious was trying to hang onto the past. Julia Rice wanted to go out with me. For years, I’d been doing my best to deflect any romantic interest that came my way. Is that what I was doing now? I’d already allowed myself to go further down that road than I ever had before, but I was trying to talk myself out of meeting her.

  Why? I didn’t know.

  “Bingo!” Patrick shouted on the other side of the squad room.

  “What?” Jen asked.

  “We’ve got a number that links Medina to Bishop’s killing.”

  “Links him how?” I said, crossing over to Patrick’s desk. Jen beat me there.

  On his MacBook screen was a simple diagram with a few dozen points interconnected by a complicated series of lines. It looked like the diagram Hynes had shown us when he’d demonstrated the program based on the military ORCA system.

  “They give you access to the database?”

  “Not at first, but Ruiz had a talk with someone.”

  “What are we looking at?” Jen asked.

  “A program that tracks digital connections.” He moved his cursor over various points on the diagram and showed her how small boxes would pop up each time he touched one of the dots. “These red dots are suspects. Medina and the three who killed Bishop.” He rolled over each of the four in turn and their names appeared with their DOB and a list of sources for the connections. “This is just the overview. There’s a lot more here. But watch.” As the cursor hit each dot in turn, Patrick highlighted it. First Medina, whose dot was by itself in the top right corner of the image, then Omar, Francisco, and Pedro, whose dots were clustered separately below Medina’s. Each of their names remained displayed on the screen. There were multiple lines connecting our three killers, but nothing between any of them and Medina.

  “But there’s no connection,” Jen said.

  “Hang on.” Patrick hit a few keys on the keyboard and another dot appeared in the upper left corner of the diagram. He clicked on it and a box with the word “unknown” popped up. “Now watch,” he said. He tapped the return key, and bright red lines appeared linking the mystery number to both Omar and Medina.

  “Find that phone,” Patrick said.

  Jen completed his thought. “And we find the connection.”

  “You call her yet?” Jen asked me.

  “No.”

  “You should.”

  “I don’t think you’re right about what she wants. I think it’s got to be something to do with work. Maybe she found some more pictures for us to look at.”

  “Call her and find out.”

  18

  ZIPLOC BAG, QUART-SIZED, CONTAINING: IRISH SPRING SOAP, ONE BAR.

  There were half a dozen new voice mails on the Bishop tip line. I followed up with quick calls on five of them that didn’t provide any new or useful information. But the sixth call, from the owner of a coin-operated laundromat near the intersection of Anaheim and Cedar, sounded more promising.

  The man was at work, and I didn’t have anything pressing on my desk, so I arranged to meet him as soon as I could get there. Thirty minutes later, we were standing in the parking lot he shared with a bodega and a liquor store.

  His name was Jae Lee and he’d owned the coin-op for ten years. He stood about five-four and had a weathered look and lean frame that at first glance made me think he would be harder than he was. I wondered whether he’d felt the need to Americanize his name.

  “I was sad to see the news article,” he said to me. “He was a good man, not like a lot of the other ones.”

  “What other ones?”

  “The other homeless people.”

  “How was Bishop different?”

  “He wa
s friendly and nice to people. He didn’t scare away the customers like some of the other ones do.”

  “No?”

  The first time Lee saw Bishop loitering outside the laundry, he worried about having to ask him to leave. He always hated to do that. Lee knew what it was like to have no place to live, and he hated to remember the days before he’d made it to Long Beach.

  So he watched the man outside, hoping he would move on of his own accord. But he didn’t. He stood outside and carefully removed the cover from his shopping cart by unhooking a couple of bungee cords. He placed them in the top child seat part of the cart and took off a folded blue blanket that covered the contents, folding it one more time and laying it neatly on top of the cords.

  Lee kept watching. He was surprised by the slow and methodical movements of the tall man outside. It was clear to Lee that the man was being very meticulous as he went through his belongings. Lee watched as he sorted his clothes into two folded piles on top of the blanket. After a few minutes of this, he had selected eight or nine pieces of clothing—shirts, socks, underwear—and put them into a reusable Ralphs shopping bag. Then he put the other clothes back into the cart, covered them again with the blanket, and reattached the cords. Then he pushed his cart up close to the window and came inside.

  Instead of going straight to a washing machine, the man approached Lee.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “Would it be all right if I did a bit of laundry?”

  Lee was surprised. He couldn’t remember anyone ever asking his permission before. “Of course,” he said. “Why not?”

  The tall man looked down at his feet. “Sometimes people such as yourself prefer not to do business with people like me.”

  Lee felt bad for the thoughts he’d had when he first spotted the shopping cart outside the window. How he’d assumed this man would quickly become a nuisance. But he wasn’t. The tall man wasn’t drunk or on drugs, he wasn’t rude, he didn’t even smell very bad. Instead he was respectful and even seemed embarrassed about feeling the need to ask to use the machines.